Refrigerated dough products are popular with consumer and commercial users due to their ease of use and ability to maintain freshness during extended periods of refrigerated storage, e.g., up to several weeks or months. It is a continuing goal in the dough and bread making arts to improve storage stability of refrigerated dough products.
For some types of dough products and dough product ingredients, storage stability can be more difficult than for others. An example of a class of dough product that can be particularly difficult to store is the class of whole-wheat doughs. At the same time, whole-wheat dough products are often specifically desired by consumers for their healthful attributes, such as a high dietary fiber content and the presence of vitamins and minerals not present in doughs prepared without whole-wheat flour (i.e., doughs prepared with processed white flour). A whole-wheat dough product that has extended refrigerated storage stability would be quite desirable to consumers.
The difficulty in storing whole-wheat doughs, as well as whole-wheat flours and other whole-wheat food products, is due to enzymes that are naturally present in a wheat grain and that can cause spoilage. These enzymes are more prevalent in wheat germ and bran, which are used to make whole wheat flour but not white flour. Thus, processes for making non-whole wheat flours, e.g., processed “white” flours, generally remove a large percentage of these enzymes. Processes for preparing whole-wheat flours, on the other hand, retain the germ and bran, resulting in whole-wheat flour compositions having relatively high concentrations of enzymes. These enzymes become part of a finished whole-wheat flour, or a dough or other food product made from a whole-wheat flour, where the enzymes can cause a relatively rapid loss of freshness, at least compared to similar products made using a non-whole-wheat flour that contains fewer active enzymes. In the particular instance of refrigerated dough products, producing a refrigerator-stable whole-wheat dough product has been a difficult challenge for dough product producers.
Because consumers specifically desire whole-wheat food products, for example a refrigerator-stable whole-wheat dough product, it is desirable to produce whole-wheat flours and food products. Especially desirable are whole-wheat flour, dough, and other food products, that retain desired freshness for extended periods of storage, e.g., refrigerated storage.